CHAPTER [III.] <XX>
I SAT one evening in my laboratory; the sun had
set, and the moon was just rising from the sea; I had not
sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a
pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour for
the night, or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention
to it. As I sat, a train of reflection occurred to me, which led
me to consider the effects of what I was now doing. Three years
before I was engaged in the same manner, and had created a fiend
whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart, and filled
it for ever with the bitterest remorse. I was now about to form
another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she
might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and
delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had
sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man, and hide himself in
deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to
become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply
with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate
each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own
deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it
when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might
turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she
might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh
provocation of being deserted by one of his own species.
Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the
new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for
which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of
devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the
very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and
full of terror. Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this
curse upon everlasting generations? I had before been moved by
the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck
senseless by his fiendish threats: but now, for the first time,
the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think
that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness
had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the [price perhaps
of] <price, perhaps, of> the existence of the
whole human race.
